18943: (Hermantin) Sun-Sentinel-Two rebel leaders plotting openly to overthrow Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Two rebel leaders plotting openly to overthrow Aristide

By Jane Regan
Special Correspondent
Posted February 21 2004

GONAIVES -- One is a former military leader who led a brutal paramilitary
group that backed the most recent of Haiti's coup d'etats, in 1991. The
other is a charismatic former soldier, once loyal to President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, who fled Haiti three years ago after being accused of drug-dealing
and treason.

Now both men -- Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Guy Phillipe -- are in Haiti
again, and this time they are openly plotting to overthrow the president.


Chamblain and Philippe showed up in this grimy, dusty port city this week to
lend their support to a rebel movement that started out as an attack by a
rag-tag group of street thugs on the police station two weeks ago.

The gang, then called the Artibonite Resistance Front, was out for revenge.
They said Aristide's men murdered their leader, Amiot Métayer, and they were
taking their revenge all the way to Haiti's National Palace in
Port-au-Prince.

Revenge they got, in a bloody attack on police headquarters here on February
5 and in skirmishes with police two days later. But revenge did not stop at
the Gonaives border. What started as a deadly gang war with the local police
in Gonaives has spread to a dozen towns and cities, including
Port-au-Prince, and left more than 50 dead -- most of them police officers.

Chamblain and Philippe crossed the border from their exile in the Dominican
Republic a week ago, and their gang of former police and soldiers -- many of
them well trained -- joined what is now called the Haitian National
Revolutionary Liberation Front.

In the past two weeks, the armed men have taken over the main police
stations in two of Haiti's nine departments or provinces, "liberating" the
regions of both cops and local officials. The rebellion and the barricades
manned by armed men and boys has also cut the country in two by controlling
the flow of goods, fuel and food along Haiti's two main national highways.

Many of the men who make up the front were once bitter enemies. But today
they have joined forces and are making international headlines.

"It is an historic coalition," said 30-year-old Butteur Métayer, leader of
the front. which has called for Aristide's resignation ever since his
brother Amiot -- the gang's former leader -- was found murdered last
September. "Today we see eye-to-eye on the need to liberate the country.
That's what's important."

The front makes its headquarters in the home of Gertrude, Butteur's sister,
who also has a home in Orlando. Her house is one of the few two-story
buildings in a poor seaside slum of this city -- a sea of concrete and sheet
metal shanties criss-crossed by dusty streets littered with barricades built
from rusted-out car hulks, rotting garbage, rocks and hundreds of smashed
bottles.

The rooms of the home have been convereted to offices and the back yard is
jammed with soldiers, officers and foreign journalists. Soldiers slip in and
out of the ramshackle shower booth nearby, rushing to rinse off before the
next sortie.

Thursday, Chamblain pulled up to the house in an unmarked SUV and hurried
into the back yard.

Soldiers -- dressed in everything from pilfered police bullet-proof vests to
motorcycle helmets to U.S. army fatigues -- rushed in and out of the grimy
house, carrying their weapons -- AR-15s, 12-gauge shotguns, Ouzis, 9
millimeters.

The two men conferred on the balcony of the home, both wearing
assault-rifle-proof body armor.

"We have to take care of something quickly," Chamblain told Philippe.

Chamblain declined to reveal more details, but Philippe noted: "Next we'll
take St. Marc and Cap-Haitien. But we have no problem with the police. Our
problem is with Aristide. We'd just as soon he resigned. We'd put down out
guns." Chamblain is remembered here for being a leader of the brutal
paramilitary group known as the Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress
(FRAPH ), which sprang up during the 1991 coup d'états against Aristide.

When the coup ended with Aristide's return in 1994, Chamblain, who was also
once a soldier, fled to the Dominican Republic, well-documented accusations
of murder and torture on his head.

Philippe is also a former soldier. When Aristide dissolved the army after
the coup ended, he was incorporated into the National Police Force. But
three years ago, Philippe was accused of drug-dealing and plotting a coup.
Philippe claimed innocence but fled to the Dominican Republic. Various
reports said he was responsible for sending ex-soldiers to attack and kill
police and government officials border towns like Pernal in recent years,
but it was never proven.

Despite the men's pasts, the rebellion they have joined continues to collect
new members.

"Every day we get new people," explained 34-year-old Emile Déré, a former
police officer who quit the force in December to join up. He is Philippe's
cousin.

Déré had a bright future when he graduated from the Haitian Police Academy
in 1995. "When I was young, I had only one dream. To join the army. But when
the army did that coup, I changed my mind."

Like many other students, he participated in the resistance movement. When
the coup ended, he joined the police.

"Now I am in the same army with FRAPH people and ex-soldiers," Déré said.
"What Aristide has done erased their evils."

Déré said that in recent years, good cops had to look over their shoulders.
Rights groups and others frequently accused the force of corruption,
drug-running and summary executions. But he also admitted that he had heard
the accusations against Chamblain.

"We aren't here to judge. For now, we both have the same objective: get rid
of Aristide. After we accomplish that he should face justice," he said.
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